'Chicago Authored': Our city's prose as history

Antonio Perez / Chicago Tribune

The Chicago History Museum's newest exhibit, "Chicago Authored," is set to open Oct. 17, 2015. The four themes of the exhibit — door, window, keyhole and mirror — spotlight the different perspectives Chicago writers have offered.

The Chicago History Museum's newest exhibit, "Chicago Authored," is set to open Oct. 17, 2015. The four themes of the exhibit — door, window, keyhole and mirror — spotlight the different perspectives Chicago writers have offered. (Antonio Perez / Chicago Tribune)

Why did the Chicago History Museum stuff Chicago's literary lions into an iPod?

Chicago writers have told their share of radical stories through the years, from Upton Sinclair exposing worker mistreatment at the city's stockyards in "The Jungle" to Mike Royko laying bare the workings of the Richard J. Daley mayoralty in "Boss."

So it's fitting that a new Chicago History Museum exhibition exploring the city's literary tradition displays more than a few radical touches, beginning with crowdsourcing as its reason for being and including a digital-first presentation, which favors iPods over artifacts, audio files over first editions.

But perhaps foremost among the exceptional ways that "Chicago Authored" is being presented to the public is this: Go ahead, the museum says, grab a coffee and a sandwich while you take it in.

More of a college commons-style space than a traditional museum exhibit, "Chicago Authored," which opens Saturday, exists adjacent to the museum's North & Clark Cafe. For it, the museum bought new furniture of both the living- and dining-room varieties, and it tore down a wall that had separated the cafe from the first-floor temporary exhibition space.

"It's like a literary cafe, like a salon. It's designed as a very social space," said John Russick, vice president for interpretation and education. "We wanted a space where you felt comfortable having a seat and taking in this content."

Graphics on the wall delineate the exhibit's four themes: door, window, keyhole, mirror. These spotlight the different perspectives Chicago writers have offered on their lives, their neighbors' lives and the city's life.

And reproductions of postcards from the museum's collection emphasize that Chicago stories don't come only from the people known as writers. "The water is so dirty in this river that it looks like milk," a 1907 correspondent wrote.

A bookcase, yet to be installed on a visit earlier this week, will be stuffed with books Chicago donors deemed important to them. So again: crowdsourcing, Russick pointed out.

(The exhibition topic of Chicago writing was chosen in an online survey — crowdsourced — in late 2013, besting such contenders as Chicago women, architecture and gangsters.)

To further the connection to the digital realm, the meat of "Chicago Authored" lives on a Chicago History Museum app. You can buy it for $1.99 at the Google Play store and also get the full range of history museum digital offerings (go to https://play.google.com and search "Chicago History"). Or you can use the free iPods and headphones provided in the exhibition and get the museum's take on Chicago writing that way.

It features many of the classics: "Boss," "The Jungle," Sandra Cisneros' "The House on Mango Street," James T. Farrell's "Studs Lonigan," Nelson Algren's "Chicago: City on the Make," Carl Sandburg's poem "Chicago."

And in the well-chosen but all-too-brief excerpts, these stories begin to come to life anew, augmented by captivating photos from the museum's collection touching on related topics. (Organized differently, this could work as a Chicago photography exhibition.)

"Stephany" and "Jalen" serve as narrators and hosts introducing the excerpts, and they mostly strike the right balance between orienting city newbies and not exasperating the more knowledgeable.

There's more than an hour's worth of content in the 25 segments on the app, Russick said, but if you want to dig deeper right away into some of these books, you'll have to hope they're among the ones on the bookshelf.

"Chicago Authored" pointedly includes some contemporary, lesser-known authors, while leaving out some leading lights.

So columnist and author Neil Steinberg is there, reading from his 2013 book "You Were Never in Chicago." And blogger Paul Dailing is in there, too, pondering the meaning of downtown Chicago in a phrase that echoes Thoreau: "I came downtown because I wanted to feel nothing."

But such celebrated works as "Sister Carrie," "The Devil in the White City," "Working," "There Are No Children Here," "Glengarry Glen Ross" and "A Raisin in the Sun" don't make the "Chicago Authored" cut.

Instead, the museum now spotlights those and six other books in a new, separate section of the app, "Crossroads Authored," a sort of literary complement to the museum's superb permanent historical exhibition, "Chicago: Crossroads of America." It's an intelligent approach to the classic curator's dilemma of having too much good material to choose from.

And, bigger picture, "Chicago Authored" is an intelligent approach to making a contemporary museum exhibition. You wouldn't want a whole museum like this: Good artifacts are far too powerful to be left on storage-room shelves or stuffed into a smartphone.

But for a show about writing, where the meaning of the words is more important than what they looked like in published form, this digital presentation is a winner. That you can experience it while having a blueberry muffin — or even while sitting at your own kitchen table — is even more of a plus and a feat worth writing about.